The Kindly Ones

Every day, more wounded arrived: they came from Kursk, from Rostov, from Kharkov, recaptured one after the other by the Soviets, from Kasserine too; and a few words with the newcomers said much more about the current situation than the military communiqués. These communiqués, which were delivered to us in the common rooms over little loudspeakers, were introduced by the overture to Bach’s cantata Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott; but the Wehrmacht used the arrangement by Wilhelm Friedma

The handsome Waffen-SS who filled the rooms were for the most part in a piteous state: often they were missing pieces of arms or legs, or even a jaw; the atmosphere wasn’t always very cheerful. But I noticed with interest that despite what the most casual reflection on the facts or the studying of a map could suggest, their faith in the Endsieg and their veneration of the Führer remained for the most part intact. This wasn’t the case for everyone; some people, in Germany, were clearly begi

I soon realized that the gaiety that had taken hold of me when I arrived in Berlin was but a thin veneer; beneath it, everything was terribly fragile, I felt made of a sandy substance that could break up at the slightest gust. Wherever I looked, the sight of ordinary life, the crowd in the trolleys or the S-Bahn, the laughter of an elegant woman, the satisfied creasing of a newspaper, struck me like contact with a sharp sliver of glass. I had the feeling that the hole in my forehead had opened up a third eye, a pineal eye, one not turned to the sun, not capable of contemplating the blinding light of the sun, but directed at the darkness, gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death, and of grasping this face behind each face of flesh and blood, beneath the smiles, through the palest, healthiest skin, the most laughing eyes. The disaster was already there and they didn’t realize it, since the disaster is the very idea of the disaster to come, which ruins everything long before term. At bottom, I repeated to myself with a hollow bitterness, it’s only the first nine months that you’re peaceful, and after that the archangel with the flaming sword chases you forever out through the door marked Lasciate ogni speranza, and you want only one single thing, to go back, then time keeps pushing you pitilessly forward, and in the end there is nothing, nothing at all. There was nothing original about these thoughts, they could have come to the lowliest soldier lost in the frozen waters of the East, who knows, when he listens to the silence, that death is near, and who perceives the infinite value of each intake of breath, of each heartbeat, of the cold, brittle sensation of the air, of the miracle of daylight. But the distance from the front is like a thick layer of moral fat, and looking at these satisfied people, I sometimes felt short of breath, I wanted to cry out. I went to the barber: there, suddenly, in front of the mirror, incongruous, fear. It was a white, clean, sterile, modern room, a discreetly expensive salon; one or two clients were occupying the other chairs. The barber had put a long black smock on me, and beneath this garment my heart was pounding, my intestines sank into a wet cold, panic drowned my whole body, the tips of my fingers prickled. I looked at my face: it was calm, but behind this calm, fear had erased everything. I closed my eyes: snip, snip, went the barber’s patient little scissors in my ear. On my way home, I had this thought: Yes, go on repeating to yourself that everything will be fine, you never know, you might end up convincing yourself. But I did not manage to convince myself, I was vacillating. I had no physical symptoms such as those I had experienced in the Ukraine or in Stalingrad: I wasn’t overcome with nausea, I didn’t vomit, my digestion was perfectly normal. Only, in the street, I felt as if I were walking on glass that was ready at any instant to shatter beneath my feet. Living required a sustained attention to things, which exhausted me. In the calm little streets near the Landwehrkanal, I found, on a windowsill on the ground floor, a long woman’s glove in blue satin. Without thinking, I took it and went on walking. I wanted to try it on; of course it was too small, but the texture of the satin excited me. I imagined the hand that must have worn this glove: this thought disturbed me. I wasn’t going to keep it; but to get rid of it I needed another window, with a little wrought-iron railing around the sill, preferably in an old building; yet in this street there were only shops, with silent, closed store-fronts. Finally, just before my hotel, I found the right window. The shutters were closed; I gently deposited the glove in the middle of the ledge, like an offering. Two days later the shutters were still closed, and the glove was still there, an opaque, discreet sign, which was certainly trying to tell me something, but what?